The Xubuntu team is happy to bring you the latest and greatest software the open source community has to offer. This is their latest result: Xubuntu 8.10, which brings a host of excellent improvements built on the rock solid Xfce 4.4.2 desktop environment.

For Ubuntu see http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-8.10-desktop
For Kubuntu see https://wiki.kubuntu.org/IntrepidIbex/Kubuntu

Upgrading from Xubuntu 8.04

To upgrade from Xubuntu 8.04, open the Update Manager from the Applications menu under System. It will tell you: New distribution release ‘8.10’ is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

New Features since Xubuntu 8.04

Abiword 2.6

Xubuntu brings you the newest Abiword 2.6.4 word processor with tons of bug-fixes and new features, some of which include:

The ability to embed gnumeric charts into your documents

A new collaboration plugin allowing users to collaboratively work on the same document in real-time

Improved support for Microsoft Office and OpenOffice documents

You can now drag and drop images in and out of AbiWord documents

the ability to open files on remote shares, ie. samba, ftp or ssh shares

much more!

Improved Multimedia Experience

Xubuntu 8.10 provides an improved multimedia experience by including the Listen Multimedia Player. With Listen, you can:

Organize your music collection

Browse Shoucast Webradio and Podcats

Read lyrics and have access Wikipedia information about artists or albums at your fingertips

Broadcast by interfacing with your icecast server

Record streaming media

Visualize good times with the built-in graphical visualizer.

Find what you’re looking for with Catfish

With Xubuntu 8.10, you’ll find an option to “Search for Files” in the Places menu. Clicking this will present you with the widely popular, light-weight search front-end called Catfish. Catfish enables you to quickly and easily search for your documents, music, pictures, videos, and more.

For the technically inclined, Catfish is a frontend for different search engines (daemons).

Easily manage your secrets

Xubuntu 8.10 includes the well known secret keeper Seahorse. Seahorse is a GTK front end for GnuPG – the Gnu Privacy Guard program. It is a tool for secure communications and data storage. Data encryption and digital signature creation can easily be performed through a GUI and Key Management operations can easily be carried out through an intuitive interface.

X.Org 7.4

X.Org 7.4, the latest stable version of X.Org, is available in this version. This release brings much better support for hot-pluggable input devices such as tablets, keyboards, and mice. At the same time this will allow the great majority of users to run without a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. A new failsafe X is introduced, to give better tools for troubleshooting X startup failures.

Two of the older nvidia binary drivers are not available for X.Org 7.4 yet, so users of these drivers will be automatically switched to the corresponding open source drivers.

Linux kernel 2.6.27

Xubuntu 8.10 includes Linux kernel 2.6.27, a significant release with better hardware support and numerous bug-fixes.

Encrypted private directory

The ecryptfs-utils package was recently promoted to Ubuntu main, with support for a secret encrypted folder in your Home Folder (by Michael Halcrow, Dustin Kirkland, and Daniel Baumann).

Network Manager 0.7

* system wide settings (i.e., no need to log in in order to get a connection)
* management of 3G connections (GSM/CDMA)
* management of multiple active devices at once
* management of PPP and PPPOE connections
* management of devices with static IP configurations
* route management for devices

DKMS

DKMS (by Dell) is included in Xubuntu 8.10, allowing kernel drivers to be automatically rebuilt when new kernels are released. This makes it possible for kernel package updates to be made available immediately without waiting for rebuilds of driver packages, and without third-party driver packages becoming out of date when installing these kernel updates.

Samba 3.2

A lot of new features have been added in Samba 3.2 amongst them:

clustered file server support

encrypted network transport

ipv6 support

better integration with the latest version of Microsoft Windows™ clients and servers.

PAM authentication framework

Xubuntu 8.10 features a new pam-auth-update tool, which allows simple management of PAM authentication configuration for both desktops and servers (by Steve Langasek). Packages providing PAM modules will be configured automatically, and users can adjust their authentication preferences by running sudo pam-auth-update.